The Problem

Our client, a radio station conglomerate, wished to transition from selling advertising slots to an audience based approach. This needed complex business rules which would enable the calculation of audiences and allocation of pricing accordingly. Automation of the process of pricing, selling and distributing advertising was a second objective with expected benefits in productivity and efficiency.

The Project

A group of five leading commercial radio stations provide local radio broadcast services to several regions in Ireland. The leadership team in this commercial group saw an opportunity to transform their commercial model by automating and digitising how they price, sell and operate their advertising.

Service Offered

Design-Build-Operate

When Keeper and the group started speaking in 2014 they had a clear vision of how they could transform their business model. The only problem was they had limited technical capability to achieve that vision. On recommendation from Fexco, they turned to Keeper who were able to advise them on a roadmap to bring this vision to life. Keeper initiated their Design-Build-Operate service. Initially, a set of UX design workshops were facilitated; in these sessions, the user personas and paths were defined thus enabling the design of and appropriate UX for the Radio Booking platform. The next phase was technical where project design and project costings were estimated. The build phase involved three developers and a QA and ran for six months.

The RadioAdbooker was then rolled out to the commercial divisions of all radio stations within the group. It made an immediate and transformational impact. For the first time, the radio stations were able to sell their advertising by the audience rather than by slots. Furthermore, the process was now consolidated on a highly functional platform which streamlined the commercial process right through to placement of the ads for broadcast. Keeper hosted this platform on AWS and provides ongoing support, maintenance and upgrades.

Tech Stack

Java, Spring, Hibernate, Angular, REST

Results

The commercial radio stations have been able to increase their advertising yield by over 25% whist creating better ad targeting for their clients. As such it has increased the profitability of these enterprises. By moving the process to a digital platform it has enhanced the productivity of the workflow and also enhanced management visibility on sales (MIS).